Children navigate a world full of auditory inputs that include both signal and noise, but what counts as signal vs. noise is dependent on children’s goals. We tested whether children in the United ...

Several theories propose that the declarative memory system plays important roles in language development, but evidence in early childhood remains limited. This is a critical gap, since children ex...

Delay of gratification tasks typically offer children a choice between a smaller immediate versus a larger delayed reward, assuming waiting is motivated by maximizing material gain. However, the of...

Executive functioning (EF), a set of cognitive skills, underlies goal-directed behavior and is crucial for adaptive functioning. Research demonstrates that supportive parenting facilitates the deve...

Children can be primed to anticipate a recently heard sentence structure. This is more likely to occur when the structures of the primes are unlikely, or surprising, for a given context. The disflu...

Children experience competition daily, with these situations requiring children to balance goal attainment with social relationships. Increasingly, within children's spaces (e.g. schools, sports cl...

Generalizing the syntactic privileges of words based on limited exposure is a fundamental aspect of language acquisition, but how well children can use distributional cues to guide this process is ...

The development of the minimal self - distinguished in the facets sense of agency, body ownership, and interoception – has recently gained attention in developmental science. While research propose...

The current study investigated early gender differences in mental rotation and navigation and the mediating role of parental gender socialization in these two types of spatial skills. A total of 12...

Cognitive offloading is often driven by an evaluation that the anticipated benefits outweigh the anticipated costs. Here, we explore the effects of benefit manipulations on children’s cognitive off...

A student’s science identity has important implications for their persistence in science classes and success in STEM careers. Unfortunately, many marginalized students in the science field do not f...

Finger counting is recognized as a valuable tool that supports young children in performing arithmetic tasks. However, concerns have been raised about whether this practice traps children in immatu...

Infants as young as 9 months demonstrate both inhibitory control, as revealed by the Spatial Negative Priming (SNP) effect, and numerical biases, such as the Operational Momentum (OM) effect – an o...

Categorization strategies differ based on an item’s origins, for example, those that are natural versus human-made. However, it is unclear if and how foods fit into these categories since these can...

Parents are motivated by many values and beliefs to have conversations about race with their children, and these conversations play an important role in shaping children’s attitudes and behaviors. ...

One expectation of children’s educational TV programs is to help children learn and generalize world-relevant information to their everyday lives. However, a majority of children’s TV programs in t...

Children’s episodic memory improves sharply between 4 and 7 years. Here, we asked whether the developing ability to impose narrative structure on events may be one reason for this change. Children ...

Spatial orientation during locomotion is a fundamental daily function that requires building mental representations of the surrounding environment. Spatial representations are based on egocentric (...

Recent research shows that children by age 5 and 6 can evaluate socially mindful actions where one acts in a way that is considerate of another person’s freedom of choice. However, less is known as...

Block construction performance is related to mathematics and block construction training leads to improvement in mathematics. However, block construction is a complex task, and it is unknown which ...

Social information processing (SIP) describes a cycle of cognitive/behavioral steps required to evaluate and respond in social situations. SIP, along with executive functioning (EF) and theory of m...

This study explored regional disparities in numerical cognition among Chinese first-graders (aged 6–8 years, mean age 7 years old), comparing non-symbolic quantity and area perception abilities bet...

The prosocial preferences of Chinese young children for individuals with varying wealth statuses were examined in the present study, focusing on their willingness to share, help, and cooperate with...

The present longitudinal microgenetic study examines the stability of inhibitory performance in German kindergarten children within one measurement (intraindividually) and across different measurem...

Cultural influences, such as a language’s reading direction and parents’ everyday interactions, can impact a child’s asymmetric mapping of information to the left and right sides of space. To deter...

In the United States, children typically learn about genetics during adolescence, despite early misconceptions about parental resemblance. This study explores whether U.S. 7- and 8-year-olds can co...

Executive function (EF) refers to processes involved in goal-directed behaviors. Good EF during early childhood is important for positive outcomes. However, little is known about how EF and tempera...

Index-finger pointing is a critical milestone for language development, thus requiring an account of its emergence. Empirical evidence indicates a correlation between caregivers’ responsiveness and...

This study explores the development of executive function (EF), focusing on inhibition, working memory (WM), and cognitive flexibility. The sample consisted of 294 children recruited in Swiss publi...

This study aimed to disentangle the impact of group conversations and mental state content on children’s theory of mind (ToM) during middle childhood by independently manipulating these two factors...

Young children often show a reality bias when thinking about fiction—they say that stories can include realistic events, while rejecting fantastical events. We sought to better understand this bias...

Preschoolers often make more optimal future-oriented decisions for another person than for themselves (i.e., other-over-self advantage). This advantage may reflect psychological distance from the s...

Climate change poses an increasingly dangerous threat to human life, necessitating widespread behavior change to mitigate its effects. Thus, targeting children, whose habits and norms are still for...

This study addresses the question of whether and how language influences mathematical cognition. Canadian students in Grades 4–7 (N = 348) were asked fraction multiplication questions in one of the...

Nature connection (NC) in early childhood is increasingly recognized as a potential pathway to the development of lifelong environmental values and behaviors – a pathway that may hold growing relev...

This study longitudinally investigated the relation between maternal mental state (MS) language when narrating a familiar wordless storybook and preschoolers’ theory of mind (ToM) abilities. Mother...

Climate change poses global challenges to health and the economy, particularly affecting children’s well-being in developing countries. Despite overwhelming scientific evidence for the reality and ...

The role of function in toddlers’ object labeling has been debated for decades in developmental science. We aimed to clarify the relation between toddlers’ understanding of functions and words usin...

Effective communication requires participants to recognize what knowledge is shared and what knowledge remains unique to each person. Although research has examined the developmental emergence of t...

Attending to numerical and spatial magnitude information is important for many math skills (e.g. measurement, proportional reasoning). The flexible attention to magnitudes (FAM) account proposes th...